True, Kasich’s incumbency gives him an edge over his Democratic opponent, Cuyahoga County
Executive Ed FitzGerald.

And what Thomas A. Flinn, the late Cleveland State political scientist, wrote in 1960 remains
accurate today: “Ohio is now and has long been a competitive, two-party state in which the
Republicans enjoy the advantage.”

Still, Republicans alone can’t re-elect Kasich. And Democrats alone can’t elect FitzGerald. The
key to statewide victory in Ohio is to run in the middle of the road. So, though Kasich and Co.
would deny it, it appears that the governor — consciously or not — has been energetically “
triangulating” his administration’s policies.

“Triangulation” often is associated with Democrat Bill Clinton’s seeming attempt to split the
difference between left and right on any given issue But “the center that the triangulating party
seeks,” British scholar-journalist Timothy Stanley wrote in 2006, “is not a fixed point between …
opposites such as capitalism and socialism. … Rather, it is a point of agreement with the public on
what the [public] regards the centrist position as being.” And a triangulating party is “endowed
with penny-pinching compassion.”

Maybe, by definition, that’s what all successful candidates on either side of the Atlantic do.
But consider this local example.

In Ohio, so-called “fracking” (horizontally drilled hydraulic fracturing wells, aimed at
producing oil and gas) concerns lots of voters. And should. And Kasich’s administration has been
all over the map (in both senses) on the issue. On fracking, Ohio’s environmental lobbies have been
stern critics of Kasich.

Even so, a galaxy of environmentalists praised Kasich last week for asking the General Assembly
for $100 million for the Clean Ohio Fund — bonds that’ll be authorized as part of newly introduced
House Bill 497, Ohio’s proposed 2014-2016 capital improvements (construction) budget, which Kasich
aides drafted.

According to the state Budget Office, the money would be split up this way: “$75 million to
acquire open space and parkland and protect ecologically sensitive areas and stream corridors …
$12.5 million to build new recreational and bicycle trails and $12.5 million [to] preserve prime,
family farmland.”

Among those praising Kasich was the (private, non-profit) Ohio Environmental Council’s Jack
Shaner, a stout defender of environmental protection: “Gov. Kasich is flexing major-league
conservation leadership, and all Ohioans will be better off because of it.”

Other groups applauding Kasich: the Nature Conservancy, the Ohio League of Conservation Voters,
the Ohio Parks and Recreation Association and the Western Reserve Land Conservancy.

Be it noted, conservation was a keystone cause of Progressive (Bull Moose) Republicans, such as
Theodore Roosevelt. Today’s Ohioans love their forests and waters, even if they aren’t prepared, as
Greenpeace was, to rappel down the outside of Procter & Gamble’s Cincinnati headquarters.
(Buckeyes can scout their own cliffs, thank you very much.)

Democrats assail Kasich-proposed income-tax cuts as welfare for the rich. So they are. But
Kasich moved heaven and earth to expand Medicaid to cover more lower-income Ohioans, bucking
ideological claptrap spouted by many other Republicans. And Washington eats 100 percent of Ohio’s
expansion costs: “Penny-pinching compassion,” anyone?

Whether politicking such as Kasich’s is calculated or inbred, principled or opportunistic, isn’t
the point. The point is, it can work. That’s a scary prospect for Democrats. So, now till Nov. 4,
Democrats’ No. 1 task is to portray John Kasich as a pal of the privileged, as a Republican in the
mold of, say, Ted Cruz or Sarah Palin — and not in the deal-making mold of, say, James A.
Rhodes.

Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes
from Ohio University.